Pssst, want to know a secret?

At age twenty (in 1979) my plan was to transfer to UF and study Architecture upon completion of my AA degree at SFCC. It was to be my “real job” while I wrote my novels and books of poetry.

Already technically trained as a draftsman, and the entire drafting department at Universal Engineering Testing Company before Flad and Associates Architects, Engineers and Planners snatched me up—I was on my way.

I wrote constantly whenever alone or had a moment during the day at work. Sounds like I’m a writer, doesn’t it?

Well, about forty poems and several short stories (that could easily have been turned into books) had already flowed out of me by age twenty-three. I’d met Jan (and fell in love forever), got married, and even had an architect on staff (the one who designed the atrium at Shands Hospital) interested in doing a series of drawings for my first book of poetry I was calling Growing Pains. My plan seemed solid.

Then, what unfortunately occurs all too often to plans us folk near the bottom might have, three things happened, almost simultaneously: the babies started coming (three in three years), drafting on tables was made obsolete by the CAD system, and the job carousel began (mostly in retail management and sales) as I tried to stay ahead of the bills. I never transferred to UF.

And a bad experience with an “If I can’t get published, what makes you think you can?” instructor of creative writing, made me the example for the class of someone who thinks they have talent after a few semesters of junior college.

I still have a folder in my filing cabinet of fabulous poetry I wrote in my car and on the grass in the common areas there, and that terrific story I wrote in his class about a religious veteran returning from Vietnam with a guilt-ridden soul who no longer recognizes or trusts the man in the mirror, who is hesitant to go home to people he’d known his whole life (or eventually to judgment day) fearing they would also only see the decorated killer he’d been in order to survive, and not “him” anymore. The plan is to finally novelize them (blended together) when I catch my breath again after this book I’m finishing now.

I also have two other novels started as well that I could choose to work in next. A science fiction novel called Harvest Time—The New Origin of Species, plus the outline is complete for the sequel to my first published thriller, Stepping on Cracks. And I now have over a hundred unpublished poems in that collection I’m constantly editing and compiling—much of which has been written since being out of my body (and reconnected to the stardust we are) utilizing a trancelike process I can only describe “as shopping at the galactic grocery store.”

Needless to say, I let that soul-sucking prick (who still lives in this town; a voice for right-wing radio) cost me over thirty years of time I could’ve devoted to serious work. Time that I’ll never get back.

Please, don’t let that happen to you, my friend. Always stay focused on what your heart truly wants. Let no one or nothing derail you. So, how did all of that change? What happened to convince me to get back to my first love? Another professor, doing it right.

When I went back to college for my teaching degree in my mid-forties, that professor rekindled me in about five minutes. It happened in my first class back in school at Saint Leo University. He walked in, carrying his briefcase, and saw me sitting there, more than twenty minutes early, alone, writing. After a few moments of moving things from his briefcase to a table and lectern, he turned and asked about what I was working on.

“Just jotting down some thoughts for a story idea that came to me in a dream last night.”

He stopped pulling things from his briefcase, hopped up on the table facing me, and smiled. For a pregnant moment, while my pen hovered in the air over my notebook, he swung his feet back and forth under that table, then said, “Why don’t you do a character analysis for your story idea? You know, decide what characters you’ll need to move the story’s theme along to some inevitable climax between good and evil. Then, use that analysis of essential characters to bring this short story you feel compelled to write to some cosmically typical, but unique conclusion. You know, a novel.”

I laughed right out loud. “My style is more eight and a half by eleven,” I said. “You know, poems for open mics, maybe a short story or an essay. Certainly nothing book length.”

No one else had come in yet, so he just kept swinging those legs back and forth and said conspiratorially, “Tell you what, you figure out how to do a character analysis, and I’ll make sure you receive an A in this class.”

I just shook my head no, because of that bad memory I’d been carrying for over twenty years before adding, “I won’t need you to give me an A. I always just make them, but I’ll certainly try to do one of those character analysis things, sounds like fun.”

That professor just sat there gazing at me for another moment, like a cow staring at a new gate, still smiling, then said something I’ll never forget. “Tonight I’m going to use something to get my hooks into this class, and I’m going to describe that ‘hooking trick’ to the go-getter who’s here early, in the front row center seat.”

He picked up the printout holding the list of students signed up for this class (Teaching Humanities in the Elementary School) and said, “Many of the students signed up to be here are seniors, and they’re so-o-o done with all of this. Ready to be teaching themselves, in a classroom of their own. But I need them to really want to be here. Like you.

“Because teaching humanities, especially in the elementary school setting is my passion. That’s why I’ll be driving three nights a week this term all the way from the coast where I’m on the faculty at Jacksonville University—so I can help even more new teachers learn to love doing it, too. What I’m saying is, soon they’ll need to get kids to want to be there as well. I prefer using the discovery method of teaching, so I’m going to let them ‘discover’ a valuable tool for their own toolbox tonight. And I want you to ‘see’ what I’m talking about unfold, so I’m letting you, uh . . .”

“Eddie Suggs,” I provided.

“. . . in on it, Eddie.” He smiled at me again, hopped off the table, selected a piece of chalk from the trough under the blackboard, and wrote his name across the top: Dr. C. L. Wilson.

He turned back to face me. “Because this is my first semester teaching at Saint Leo, none of the students have any preconceived notions about me, or how this class might go. But their need to get this required class completed before it will be offered again has outweighed their fear of the devil they don’t know. That got them in front of me, but I need them excited. To want to be here—with me. Now, don’t I look like any other non-threatening sixty-five-year-old nerd professor? Don’t answer that,” he chuckled.

But I said anyway, “I wouldn’t know. This is actually my first upper-division class. See, I haven’t been in a college classroom for nearly twenty years.”

Without the slightest hesitation, he plowed ahead. “Here’s that ‘hook’ Eddie. It’s something that’s not in the syllabus.” He leaned in. “I’m the senior division cross-Florida canoe, bicycle, and marathon Ironman record holder.”

Well, my eyebrows shot up, and he smiled again. “Yep,” he said. “They’ll also be like, ‘no shit?’ And that reaction is what I want. For them to ‘discover’ that I can be really good and enthusiastic about something extremely hard, like—you know, reaching, and teaching children to appreciate the humanities. And, here’s something I hope you might end up discovering. That you’re not just here to learn how to become a great teacher. You are actually an undiscovered, potentially terrific writer, right here in our nerd-teacher midst. But we don’t know that about you yet, do we?” he said, smiling broadly. And by we, I knew he meant me. A few years later he got a mention in my first novel’s dedication.

Well, hundreds of authors’ voices whose books I’ve devoured since I was seven began laughing all at once. At him, and at me. And I heard again the voice of that prick ”professor” in 1979, who’d never made it at writing professionally, who’d instead made a teaching career out of taking the steam out of wide-eyed kids, with one or two semesters of junior college under their belts, who might be thinking they could.

Then, twenty years later, this geriatric Ironman, who’d never seen a thing I’d written, says I might one day write something special by simply deciding to follow through—on a dream. Not laughing up his sleeve, but applauding me for thinking maybe, just maybe, I could be a teacher and a serious writer. Actually get paid to do something cool that I love, so I should hurry up, he implored me, and write my ass off about being messed up by shit that I seem to truly know way too much about.

Not only did I earn my A, I completed the character analysis, and wrote twenty percent of the novel Stepping on Cracks that semester. I also adopted his discovery method of teaching. And used my class project to create a “hooking lesson” called “Poetry Detectives” where my elementary students learned who their teacher really was on the very first day of school each year by analyzing a poem written about a child that moved all the time, enduring yet another move again—that they discovered was an original of mine, about me, as a child from their area. I graduated top of my class with only one B to blemish my record two years later. (Given to me inappropriately by a female black reading instructor who was dismissed later for doing that serially to white male education majors).

So, here I am, finally doing my thing in my sixties, because I can’t be stopped. Even without the legs I lost beneath the wheels of a log truck, and several more lost years of recovery time that included years of intense physical therapy and continuing psychological treatment for depression and guilt-associated self-loathing. Who’s found through treatment why I can’t form lasting attachments to people, places, or jobs (a byproduct of being moved over twenty times from one end of this state to the other, and from one dilapidated shack to another as an itinerant farming family, by the age of thirteen).

But I am now a living example that there’s no bottom you can’t come back from, or issue you cannot learn to deal with properly, not as long as you aren’t afraid to ask for help, are willing to accept it, and then be willing do the work required to change the bad outcomes you’ve been accepting.

Remember this old saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know it if you get there.” But if you do know, trust me, just go. It’s been waiting for you to beat the door down.